MÉXICO CITY ART WEEK 2021, DECONSTRUCTING POWER STRUCTURES
In response to this year’s restrictions and safety precautions, México City’s La Semana de Arte (Art Week) took a more project-based and collaborative approach. While Feria Material (Material Fair) postponed their showing at Frontón México until 2022, Zonamaco, the biggest fair usually hosted at the Centro Citibanamex, instead took a decentralized approach. In a condo-like format, Zonamaco invited México City-based galleries to host other Mexican galleries lending to many group presentations, site-specific projects, and nuanced works that responded to the specific architecture of their environments rather than the usual white-walled fair booth. This was also the opportunity for new ventures such as Salón Cosa to inaugurate.
Aside from a shift in the format of the fairs and gallery showings, many of the artists and collectives presented work that signalled a desire for a personal realignment and a societal social and political reorientation. There was an overarching investigation into our relationship with nature and culture and how that pertains explicitly to gendered identities and our understanding between technology and the environment. Through a re-mixing of traditional Mexican symbols and motifs from military, muscle, car, and cowboy cultures, many artists worked to deconstruct existing power structures, challenge deeply entrenched and often problematic systems, and offer alternative visions for living.
Bárbara Sánchez-Kane: Prêt-à-Patria
Abril 27, 2021
kurimanzutto
To commemorate their 20th anniversary, in February 2020 kurimanzutto opened their Siembra initiative. Having been celebrated for alternative exhibition formats and offsite presentations since their inception, this project builds on that legacy and consists of dividing the gallery space into seven rooms, each to be inhabited by various artists, projects and collectives, both from their gallery roster and externally. Much like crops are planted in cycles and have cross-over growing seasons, Siembra envisions the gallery as a field to be sown. Within the challenges that the pandemic brought, this format offers a more collaborative and fluid way of working. As part of a Siembra cycle that began during Art Week, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane took over one of the rooms with a sculptural installation and video performance. Titled Prêt-à-Patria, the exhibition is a continuation of Sánchez-Kane’s deconstruction of gender identities through clothing, with a specific focus on machismo culture as expressed in the Army.
The video depicts a military escort parade, with a band of actual soldiers dressed in costumes designed by Sánchez-Kane. Riffing on Mexican military uniforms, she re-mixes a dark green suit with an open back that exposes red lacy lingerie. Shown alongside the video are three golden mannequins clad in Sánchez-Kane’s designs, connected to each other through a vertical pole that protrudes through their gaping mouths. Both kissing ass and staying in line, these figures suggest a military mentality of following ordered rules as well as a position of masculinity that often goes hand in hand with sexual violence against women. While the mannequins strain their necks to look up to the figures above, an erection in the form of a compact mirror protrudes from the uniform, confronting the viewer—the lines between pleasure and pain, responsibility and complicity are blurred. Can a violent system be adapted or is it inherently rotten? What other forms of masculinity can be imagined? What performances of masculine presentation allow for the survival and thriving of female-identifying people? For Sánchez-Kane, the military system is a “pinnacle of a type of masculinity that has to end, which is hyper-masculine, hegemonic masculinity,” and that which does not allow for non-heteronormative ways of living.
ACTUAL MILITARY SOLDIERS DRESSED IN COSTUMES DESIGNED BY SANPERFORM IN PRÊT-À-PATRIA WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY BÁRBARA SÁNCHEZ-KANE AT SIEMBRA 21, KURIMANZUTTO.
Yope project space: Loma bonita
April 27 – May 2, 2021
kurimanzutto
For their Art Week project, kurimanzutto invited Yope project space to take part in the Siembra cycle. A physical and virtual platform dedicated to the production, exhibition and dissemination of contemporary Oaxacan art, Yope project space is a collective managed by Andy Medina, David Zafra Gatica, Gibran Mendoza, Kasser Sánchez, Jou Morales, Julio García Aguilar and Vidal Martinez. While each member produced their own work, they organized collectively to create a site-specific installation in kurimanzutto’s annex space. For this event, Andy Medina built upon his ongoing Superarme project in which he hijacks the Supreme logo as a larger mediation on brand value and the power of design to operate as a language. Medina was initially attracted to the minimalist branding of Supreme and the ability for it to become seemingly ubiquitous on a global scale and garner respect and recognition, even in instances of copies. For his branding exercise at kurimanzutto, Medina placed one of his father’s old racing bikes atop of a uniquely designed plinth. Reminiscent of the architectural shape of pre-Hispanic Mexican pyramids, the bottom trim is mirrored, reflecting back on the viewer and connecting the reference to present-day México. For him, the blue is a marketing tool to grab the viewer’s attention and to command them to analyze the many references, chiefly the bicycle which refers to the 1968 Summer Olympics held in México City. The first Olympic games to be hosted in Latin America and staged in a Spanish-speaking country, it was also a heavily protested event within the country and resulted in the Tlatelolco massacre in which Mexican Armed Forces opened fire on student protestors.
Salón Cosa: A Gathering of Contemporary Objects
April 29 – May 31, 2021
Jardín 17 Casa Barragán
Founded by Mario Ballesteros and Daniela Elbahara, Salón Cosa had its first iteration this Art Week. Created as an alternative to the traditional art fair model that is often expensive, requires artists to be represented by a gallery, and often excludes designers, Salón Cosa was a curated group presentation that brought together collectible design and contemporary art. The show spanned the entire length of Jardín 17 Casa Barragán with an intermingling of sculptural works in the garden that led up to a two-room indoor presentation, with what Ballesteros called the “light room” and the “dark room,” both for the color palette and thematic tone of the works. Amongst the 50 original collectible objects from a diverse group of contemporary artists, architects, designers, and artisans, a recurring interest in addressing existing notions of Mexican masculinity, especially as it relates to queerness emerged.
In trenBolone (2021), Victor Barragán presents an outdoor exercise area fitted with a bench press and an assortment of free-standing weights. Crafted from concrete and aluminum, the equipment features large spikes on the handles and bench, disrupting any potential for easy or comfortable movement. He explained that it was his response to the “constant overdose of daily, toxic, hyper-machismo, we encounter through our screens.” Inside the house, Puki’s Marica, (2021) is a blazer created with traditional weaving techniques. However, the pattern writes out various slurs used against the LGBTQ+ community, which as a nonbinary artist from a remote community in Michoacán, Puki has personal experience with. By re-creating these phrases and creating an opportunity for an individual to wear these phrases on their back, they use a sense of humor and fashion to flip the codes of identity onto the viewer and potential abuser. The wearer takes command of the possible abuse.
TRENBOLONE SERIES 2021. PHOTOGRAPHY BY LIZ ZEPPEDA.
ALDO ÁLVAREZ TOSTADO, ESCENA DE POTRERO (FROM THE SERIES PITA Y PITO), SADDLE 2021.
On the porch of the house is Aldo Álvarez Tostado’s diptych sculpture Escena de potrero (from the series Pita y pito) (2021). Comprising a saddle and a whistled belt, the work refers to Álvarez Tostado’s upbringing in rural Nayarit and machismo traditions around horse-back riding and ranch culture, as well as a nod to Luis Barragán being an avid horse rider. The artist also noted that he was created the work in direct response to the garden as he was interested in engaging in the queer politics that surrounds Barragán and bringing him into a current conversation surrounding queerness. The pieces combine artisan and industrial processes in workshops in San Miguel el Alto, Tonalá, Zapopan, Guadalajara and Tepotzotlán, State of México, while bringing in contemporary codes and symbols from the queer communities that the artist is a part of. While the saddle leather is chiseled and the belt embroidered using Piteado, a traditional technique, the symbols carved into the objects refer to codes used in gay male dating apps. Most prominently, “masc4masc,” an expression that indicates that masculine-identifying and acting men are seeking other “masculine” men, is written in the belt’s base. The artist explained that men in the community where he was raised choose phrases or symbols for their belt buckle that exemplify their vision of ideal masculinity with the belt buckle serving a tool to perform this identity. By inserting a phrase that is omnipresent in his current queer community, yet still potentially problematic for its exclusionary definition of how to conceptualize of a queer man and what type of queerness is desirable, within the heteronormative space that the belt buckle signifies, Álvarez Tostado entangles both versions of masculinity as needing to be re-worked and even reimagined. For Álvarez Tostado, both the culture of his rural upbringing and urban queer communities call for an adaptation.
ALDO ÁLVAREZ TOSTADO, EMBROIDERED BELT.
Fernando Ocaña: Naturaleza de la Colisión
April 29, 2021 – May 30, 2021
Atra Galería
Naturaleza de la Colisión is a further development in Fernando Ocaña’s long-term investigation into speed. Trained as a car designer and having spent most of his career working in Europe, Ocaña returned to México City to pursue independent projects and subsequently began artistic experiments. With a continued fascination into the potential poetics of physics and the philosophical as well as volatile force of the impact of a collision, Ocaña pairs a meteorite with shattered glass sourced from car wrecks to offer a meditation on our understanding of nature and technology. At a time in which humans are increasingly disconnected from nature, Ocaña offers a collision as a space for pause as well as a departure point to reflect and reorient. While the initial impulse might be to conceive of the automobile as a high-tech and even unnatural form, it is created from many organic materials, specifically from metals that are dug from deep inside the earth. A highly introspective sculptural series, Ocaña was reminded by his father that he smashed his head hard enough to break during a car accident when he was a child. For the artist, chaos marks an opportunity for new beginnings, whether something as vast as the cosmos or on the personal and quotidien scale.
N.A.S.A.(L): Saludos Amigos
April 26 – May 16, 2021
N.A.S.A.(L) is an independent contemporary art project launched by Mauricio Aguirre with locations in Ecuador and Peru. He will be opening a new space in México City in the fall. For his Art Week contribution, Aguirre organized a group exhibition on the site of an old grocery store in the Santa María la Ribera neighborhood of the city. Titled Saludos Amigos, the presentation brought together nineteen Latin American artists, with a focus on those in the early years of their careers. Amongst the diverse works the themes of performing or refusing to perform a prescribed gender identity as well as how those identities lend to violence came to the fore.
In Mechanisms and evidence of genital coevolution: The roles of natural selection, mate choice, and sexual conflict (2021), Alejandro García Contreras constructs a fantastical environment in which serpents with vaginal mouths stand-off against those that are entirely phallic. Crafted from ceramics with a luminous glaze that is suggestive of metal, the snakes feel as if they are on the precipice of thrashing at any moment. As the ones that are both phallic and vaginal outnumber those that are entirely phallic, García Contreras seems to project a vision of queer futurity in which masculinity is more fluid and not so easily associated with current conservative understandings of how gender and sex construct identity. To create 540 Detonaciones (2019), Miriam Salado strung together 540 bullets that she collected from the desert in Sonora, her home state. The debris from many illegal weapons, such as AK-47 and R-15 firearms, as a consequence of drug trafficking in Northern México, the bullets represent the potential loss of lives and of physical and psychological threats to entire communities. Attached to cowhide belts, Salado’s sculptures are able to be activated through movement and subsequently produce a deafening crash when shaken.
MECHANISMS AND EVIDENCE OF GENITAL COEVOLUTION: THE ROLES OF NATURAL SELECTION, MATE CHOICE, AND SEXUAL CONFLICT, 2021. PHOTOGRAPHY BY LIZ ZEPEDA.